Thursday, July 31, 2008

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) just announced the WaSP Curriculum Framework. The framework's goal is to identify the skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers. Outlines for a set of foundation courses that can be readily adapted into an existing program at a college, school, or university will be released in March 2009. This curriculum framework is intended to be a "living" curriculum with contributions from web educators and web professionals.

The WC3 Question & Answer blog post on the proposed framework states, "After years of hearing people lament that we would not get a better web until we get better ways of teaching the Web to the professionals (of today and tomorrow), is very exciting to see the recent crop of community driven efforts to provide material and guidance for the teaching of Web technologies."

Google has launched a beta of Knol — kind of like Wikipedia with a twist. Google defines a knol as "a unit of knowledge" and explains that a knol is an "authoritative article about a specific topic".Just like Wikipedia, anyone can post an article. See Web Design Best Practices for an example. :-)

Friday, July 25, 2008

Alexa lives up to its tagline: A Web Information Company — providing more than search results. You can use Alexa to find out more about a web site: with displays of an overview (including a screen capture and contact information), traffic statistics (when available), sites linking in, and a direct link to the Web Archive to view how the site looked in the past.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Grokker offers both an outline view and a visual view of search results. This provides a way to easily drill down into topics of interest in an organized manner and search within the results. Grokker searches your choice of Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and Amazon Books for information. An interesting twist is that Grokker can be licensed by businesses as an enterprise search management tool to mine their databases for information.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Continuing this week's topic of search engines — you may want to explore your favorite topic using KartOO. This visual search engine builds a mind map of websites related to your search terms. Somehow, exploring a cloud of websites is more fun than looking at page after page of text-based search engine results. :-)

Monday, July 21, 2008

Searchme is a visual search engine that begins to show you results while you are typing your keyword or phrase. In addition to the expected search engine results page (SERP), Searchme displays the home pages of the web pages in a "deck" across the upper part of the page. A handy tool for those who think visually!

About This Blog

Dr. Terry Ann Morris, the author of best-selling web development textbooks published under the name of Terry Felke-Morris, has worked with the Web since 1996. She holds Professor Emerita status at Harper College after building the web development program from the ground up and teaching web development, computer information systems, and instructional technology courses.

The Basics of Web Design: HTML5 & CSS3 textbook takes an innovative approach to prepare students to design web pages. The design of the book is intended to appeal to today's busy, multi-tasking, visual learners with each topic introduced in two pages with full color printing.

The Web Development & Design Foundations with HTML5 textbook integrates HTML and CSS topics such as configuring text, color, and page layout with an enhanced focus on the topics of accessibility, usability, and web standards. This traditional textbook offers multiple case studies with each chapter and helps to prepare students to design web pages that take advantage of new HTML5 coding techniques.